Sorry, Vegans: Brussels Sprouts Like to Live, Too

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Editor's Note: Interesting article on the (not unexpected) complexity of plants. The author seems to be implying that because plants have sophisticated evolutionary defenses, that they must have emotional aspects comparable to animals, and therefore -- what? That we should not eat plants OR animals? Or that we should go ahead and eat animals because plants also have "feelings" and factory farming, animal cruelty, fur, etc., is therefore somehow justified? In short, this is a pretty silly article.

I stopped eating pork about eight years ago, after a scientist happened to mention that the animal whose teeth most closely resemble our own is the pig. Unable to shake the image of a perky little pig flashing me a brilliant George Clooney smile, I decided it was easier to forgo the Christmas ham. A couple of years later, I gave up on all mammalian meat, period. I still eat fish and poultry, however and pour eggnog in my coffee. My dietary decisions are arbitrary and inconsistent, and when friends ask why I'm willing to try the duck but not the lamb, I don't have a good answer. Food choices are often like that: difficult to articulate yet strongly held. And lately, debates over food choices have flared with particular vehemence.

In his new book, "Eating Animals," the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer describes his gradual transformation from omnivorous, oblivious slacker who "waffled among any number of diets" to "committed vegetarian." Last month, Gary Steiner, a philosopher at Bucknell University, argued on the Op-Ed page of The New York Times that people should strive to be "strict ethical vegans" like himself, avoiding all products derived from animals, including wool and silk. Killing animals for human food and finery is nothing less than "outright murder," he said, Isaac Bashevis Singer's "eternal Treblinka."

But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to "committed vegetarians" and "strong ethical vegans," we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants -- their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar -- the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It's time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.

When plant biologists speak of their subjects, they use active verbs and vivid images. Plants "forage" for resources like light and soil nutrients and "anticipate" rough spots and opportunities. By analyzing the ratio of red light and far red light falling on their leaves, for example, they can sense the presence of other chlorophyllated competitors nearby and try to grow the other way. Their roots ride the underground "rhizosphere" and engage in cross-cultural and microbial trade.

My goal in choosing a vegan diet is to reduce the amount of suffering in world. I am not perfect, and I know that just living in the world causes a certain amount of suffering.

When I compare the suffering of an ear of corn being plucked from its stalk, to the suffering of a chicken raised in a factory farm and killed in an industrial slaughterhouse, there is no comparison. It is clear to me which food choice creates less suffering. Besides which, the chickens were raised on corn too, so its not like the choice is between chickens or corn, meat or plants. All the animals we like to eat, eat plants to grow big and fat so we can kill them.

There are over 700 comments on this article on the NYT website and they run 10 to 1 against the article, pointing out all the fallacies in the article. That gives me hope.

The reason this story is especially silly is that plants are the base of the food chain. If you eat animals, there are 2 to 16 pounds of plants hidden in every pound of meat, dairy, or eggs. After all, the animal muscle did not materialize out of nothing.

If you want to eat fewer plants, paradoxically the best way to accomplish this is to eat a diet that is ALL plants. Then you are sparing the many more plants that the farmed animals would have been fed.